Each week, while my eight-year-old has drum lessons, my eleven-year-old and I wait for him in the charming basement music shop where the lessons are held, idly browsing drum sticks and guitar picks — all of them different from one another — hickory or maple (sticks), felt or seashell or bamboo (picks) — and in this slightly pleasant, slightly boring way, we pass the time.

Boredom, the research says, is good for the brain, so the payoff in these weekly excursions is quite high. Music lessons are already the quintessential extra-curricular activity. And, waiting in a place like this seems to involve precisely the species of mild boredom currently rumoured (contra screen-time) to best support executive functioning and creativity in children.

Furthermore, waiting around like this feels like a portal back to my own childhood — especially since the music shop itself, with its old carpet and dim lighting, replicates so convincingly the church basements and barely-surviving shops that populated my childhood’s small towns.

Betterment, cognitive development, sentiment: a parenting hat-trick.

But this week, while I wander the music shop — distantly listening to the drum teacher modelling fundamentals and syncopation for my son — I look at my phone and see a message from my daughter’s Grade 6 teacher: “Federal debate on CBC news and online. If possible would be great for Gr. 6 to watch. From 5-7pm.”

Shoot: the leadership debate. I forgot it was tonight.

I check the time. Nearly 5:30. In a few minutes drum lessons will end.

I turn the screen in my daughter’s direction, show her the message and the current time.

“We still need to get groceries on the way home,” I tell her. “But we’ll hurry.”

Once home, we grab some snacks from our cloth bags (remembered — a triumph) and abandon the rest of the groceries on the kitchen floor to be unpacked later. One of the great surprises and pleasures of parenting so far has been having kids who are interested in politics, and who enjoy watching political debates and election night coverage on TV with me the way some families watch televised sports. It’s not that we don’t take the process seriously — we do — but we enjoy the spectacle of it, too. Put political theatre on television and we are here for it — with popcorn.

We settle in and turn on the TV. The game is underway and it’s already a hockey fight. For the first few minutes we can barely hear a thing anyone says. Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Blanchet are talking over each other. Now it is Mr. Scheer’s turn to talk over Mr. Trudeau, and Mr. Trudeau returns the favour. Ms. May interjects to bring the discussion to climate. Mr. Singh times his sound bite deliveries less than expertly, but what he lacks in pacing he makes up for by presenting himself, against the free-for-all of the others (excluding May, who makes her singular point forcefully), as a leader with dignity and integrity. The alternative, a la Trudeau 2015. Trudeau 2019 brings the puck back to the centre line.

“Why are pipelines bad?” my son asks, a question I would like to answer in a way that is helpful to his understanding. How can I help him to imagine more complexly, to exchange the vague “bad” at the end of his question for a more specific understanding of the real harms involved, while keeping the level of our conversation age-appropriate? And, anyway, what is Singh saying right now?

I say: “Can we talk about it after, so that we don’t miss what they’re saying?”

He nods.

A question comes up about Bill 21, and I begin to explain so they can follow the conversation: “That’s the bill in Quebec—”

I pause a little to think about how to explain it to them, but my daughter nods quickly and finishes my sentence for me, fluently: “Banning religious symbols,” she says, “in public jobs.”

I look at her. She is unselfconsciously intent on the TV. Eleven years old.

Now she responds to whatever someone else has just said, and that I’ve missed. “That’s stupid,” she says. “Of course, Singh is against it.”

She has her own ideas, influenced by mine and by her dad’s to be sure, but she is coming into her own.

I want to give my children something I didn’t have when I was a child — an understanding that electoral politics have extensive and legible stakes for our real lives, and that children can and should be encouraged to pay attention.

I don’t think there’s anything more important for children to grow up understanding politically than the basic fact that how the world works benefits some people more than others, for specific reasons.

We know about music lessons: that’s in our parenting repertoire.

We’ve shared enough of the articles about boredom and creativity, the ones that all say a version of the same thing.

Maybe we can spread the word with each other as parents that the world simply will not any longer just hum along swimmingly while we focus on our own and our children’s personal achievement.

That, in fact, such a life was only ever possible as a result of staggering and unjust privilege, and exploitation at a planetary scale.

When they hit the polling stations on their 18th birthdays, this generation should be a force to be reckoned with. That’s our job. Elections like the one coming up on October 21 change material conditions in ways that can make life better for all of us, or else worse for most of us. Our kids should know that.

We do not need a portal back to our own childhoods. We need a path for our children’s future.

“What’s a carbon tax?” my eight-year-old asks.

His sister and I do our best to explain.

Lisa Martin is a mother of two and co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss. Her second collection of poetry was a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Prize in 2018.